Mailstore filesystem

[Daniel Eckl]

I had this setup with ext3 before and I had severe problems with extreme
load through high iowait and the system hangs for up to 20 seconds while
the filesystem flushed unwritten data to disk.
This was on a SCSI hardware RAID 5.

At the moment I have a temporary machine running the same system with
reiserfs. While I still have the problem of occasional high load, the
system now never freezes or hangs, just slowes down. (I had questioned
that on the mailing list twice, but didn't get any answer at all)
The temp machine has a SATA hardware RAID-1

I think this is because reiserfs is better handling a lot of small
files, while ext3 performes better with a few big files.

Second advantage from reiserfs is that I don't need to wait for a
filesystem scan when I made a kernel update.

I now want to switch bak to the original machine with SCSI Raid-5 and I
think I will choose XFS this time. It should have all the advantages
which reiserfs has, too.

I would be very glad to hear the comments from the list on this subject.

Best,
Daniel

Søren Schimkat schrieb:
> Hi guys
> 
> I'm about to migrate from Solaris with Sendmail / uw to Redhat
> Enterprise Linux with Postfix / Cyrus. Everything seems to work just
> fine, but one unsolved question remains: Which filesystem should I choose?
> 
> I really would like to use ext3 .. because it's works great and seems
> rock solid, but i'm scareed shitless of inode starvation. Any thoughts
> on that one?
> 
> Which filesystem would you recomend?
> 
> Regards Søren
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